culture of thought, paranoia, and my thesis
People who know me often think I'm crazy on (among others) this one point, which is that I can't tell the difference between honest misunderstanding and malicious misinterpretation. As a result, I get remarkably angry remarkably quickly when I am talking seriously about something and we're not on the same page. (I want to distinguish this from chatting, especially chatting in a group, which is just sort of a different experience.) Since I frequently want to talk about extremely unusually positioned topics, this tends to limit the conversations I can have. Specifically to: people who like it when I babble, topics that already resonate with the person I'm talking to, or brief discussions until a misunderstanding inevitably occurs.
This topic occurred to me today because I just realized there is a difference. And part of the difference for me is that I was exposed to malicious misinterpretation more seriously and earlier than I was exposed to honest misunderstanding. A bit of context:
I'm having trouble in grad school. My trouble is the most obvious one: making progress on my thesis. I did not realize coming in how much grad school is not about being smart and doing your work, but about orienting yourself with respect to intellectual exploration. Of course, people say this all the time, but that doesn't mean that as an easy undergrad, I really believed it, or understood what it meant. Until my recent struggles in grad school, I wasn't aware of the existence, or relevance, or dynamics, of the phenomenon of culture of thought.
But it's actually really important, especially to research. Another thing everyone has said that I never understood: That free thought is important to scientific and societal advancement.
I never understood this because I didn't understand what free thought was. I didn't realize it wasn't just 'you can think what you want about something', but 'you can think about what you want'. And it wasn't just 'you can think about what you want', but 'you can think about what you want, and make a living doing it, and try get people on board with it'.
So there's a difference between thinking about what people have thought about already, and thinking about something new, right? The end goal of research and development is the latter. Doing that is sort of what higher education is about. I guess I used to think of grad school as just thinking about a larger, more specific portion of what people have already thought. It's what it looked like from down lower. After all, prior to it, that's what intellectual advancement was.
The other, probably larger, piece of this is the societal one, the one about culture of thought. In retrospect, my family was really very pathological (not just a little pathological) about how thought and idea sharing works, probably from being trained in a different culture. In this, the kind of obvious explanation (so obvious I'm reluctant to rely on it) is the political one that has to do with their background with censorship. But I have to admit, my parents are kind of a perfect age, not necessarily to be maximally censored, but more to be maximally pathological about it-- they were teenagers during the communist revolution. They were late teens when the party's corruption was revealed. They went to college the first year colleges re-opened.
However, reluctant as I am, this at least would explain their attitude that 'you must learn and discover new things', but also that 'all new things discovered must be re-iterations of existing things, really'.
In other words, if I'm talking to you and you think that something I say means something else, and I jump on you for daring to suggest that they are the same thing, it may be because I have people in my life who are actually trying to convince me that what I'm saying means something else.
Of course, the revelation here for me is the reverse: When I am talking to someone and they misinterpret me, they are in fact trying to understand what I am actually saying, rather than subtly communicating that it is not socially acceptable for me to say it.
I think this distinction may be the sort of thing that is at the crux of free thought. If this is the case, I have become convinced of the free thought - intellectual advancement thing for the following reason:
I am not going to be able to finish my thesis unless I learn to get over this.
Because no matter how clever I am, how easily I can finish my classes, how internally connected and thorough and good at talking to myself I am, I am not going to be able to deliver a complete project on the size of a 100-page report perfect and fait accompli without consulting with other people. Nor am I ever going to get through any substantive portion of its length without running into misunderstandings. And if I feel like either my locutor is hostile or I need to revise my topic every time that happens, I will continue to stall forever. (Especially because my program will let me.)
Otherwise, I would be forced to talk only about things that are so strange that nobody could possibly think they might know what I'm talking about enough to misunderstand.